TSG45 After Action Report

[Maxym]

Game status:Science Victory
Game date:1814AD
Turns played:277
Base score:1469
Final score:2670
Time played:17:41:00

Not sure how this finsih will stack up especially since my 4 city tradition opening ended up with only 3 cities, so extra GS less and prolly later plastics. I have neve conquered the celts and even ended up doing peacekeeping duties when nappy was about to run them over. She Dowed me 3 or 4 times before becoming a friend and even completing two RAs. Cathe joined her in one of the DoWs and lost a city and gave me another one in a peace deal. So i had a two puppets in addion to my 3 core cities. Did not need them to build parts as i was still researching some techs after building apollo. Even with coastal location of Amsterdam (2NE) i was cranking out 270+ when building parts.

about 9 turns after platsics i bulbed all my GS and used a GE for hubble. mismanaged GS pop and it added few turns but any major improvement would have needed a different strategy. I could have beelined education and then public schools better, i went for guilds and chemistry first. By the time I made it to other side, Sweden was gone taken out by Liz.
Thanks for the game it was entertaining.

I did get another achievement as i assume Spain was added to the mix for that purpose so on turn 277 my beggar captured Madrid from my former friend and ally Isabela, who was so sure of our game long frienship she did not even ask what the hell all those SAM and paratroops were doing at her borders. She did keep frigates covering sea access to her cities so i had to build a nuclear sub and used it to clear them out.

 

[Arilian]

I have finished 276, it seems this date happened to a lots of us. I will upload sometime, when I get home again


Went to sailing + goddess of the sea, then writing GL+NC (with another city rush bought)
then another city to 3city tradition.

My cities were placed quite differently than anyone else but still had about the same results it seems. I have moved by settler SW-SW becuase I know there is a see north, and I did not know there is a crab and fish. At least this way I had 4 sea resource in my Cap.

I was extremely unlucky with this GOTM, getting bad huts (no pop or culture), missing two huts by 1 turn due foreign scouts, missing Stonehenge by 1 turn, losing my scout when he was about to capture a barb camp targeted by 2 CS with a worker in it, when he should have won the fight, loosing Celts to Catherine 2 turns before RA matured, losing to Augustus Sweden 3 turns after Friendship, choosing bad religion as a test...

Talking about religion, I have planned to get the one where conversion grants science.
Converting Moscow with a GP totally, granted 200breaker when I did 600/turn. Converting with missionary provided 40-80 breakers. How is this calculated? In short, it was quite bad, should have chosen anything else..


The end game went well, had enough science to pop everything and get Hubble, and quickly build all parts. But I was too behind already.

Polders are great but only after economics and that’s too late to have any significant results.

I never used sea beggars as I played peacefully.

The UA is great, but I know that from experience.

Policy wise, I went full TRAD, Left side of RAT, and middle to of Order for +25%sci for Fact.

 

[TyfoonTurk]

t326

forgot about PT, hubble and that particle physics needs the upper section of tech tree. first science game on GK...

went 4 city tradition setup

if you exchange luxuries with AI with double luxuries, you get 6 hap from 1 luxury. (4 for unique + 2 UA)

 

[Arilian]

"if you exchange luxuries with AI with double luxuries, you get 6 hap from 1 luxury. "

What is also fun to get Commerce, and get 4 happy for any lux you do not even have. Too bad for a science game commerce is out of the question.

 

[Cromagnus]

I didn't submit, because around turn 100 I did something really boneheaded. (placed a city on the wrong tile by accident)

After that, decided I'd rather reload than keep playing. Ended up with a turn 310 Science Victory fwiw, and it would have been a lot sooner, but I really wanted to play around with Sea Beggars. Had sooo much fun with that. I cap'd every coastal capital by turn 220 or so, (Madrid, Moscow, Rome, and maybe one other?)

Madrid was a wonder farm, so my final score was like 2800 or so.

I probably could have finished with a Domination win by turn 260-280. But yeah, all that conquest slowed my science growth.

Funny thing: London was coastal, but on a rare inland sea, if I recall, so I couldn't go after it.

It was fun to laugh at Elisabeth for building a huge navy inside that sea though. ;-)

And that start sucked. Man lol. Polders are great for growth but they come so late... Also, I hate that the AI won't expand cities into marsh tiles for the Dutch.

 

[Arilian]

Game: Civ5 GOTM 45
Date submitted: 2012-10-08
Reference number: 27395
Your name: Arilian
Game status: Science Victory
Game date: 1812AD
Turns played: 276
Base score: 1060
Final score: 1927
Time played: 2:08:00
Submitted save: Arilian_TSG45_Sapcewin.Civ5Save
Renamed file: Arilian_C504501.Civ5Save

Description up a few post.
As you can see from "Time played" this game for me was more like CLIK not THINK I got angry about my bad luck in the beginning,

 

[Tabarnak]

Game: Civ5 GOTM 45
Date submitted: 2012-10-08
Your name: Tabarnak
Game status: Science Victory
Game date: 1700AD
Turns played: 250
Base score: 1321
Final score: 2642
Time played: 6:18:00
Submitted save: William_0250 AD-1700.Civ5Save

Bah i didn't like the late turns. I struggled at getting enough gs at the end. I did buid some wonders that didn't go early. In fact it was pretty late in the game but heh it's look like in this game the IA is not wonderspamming at all.

Spoiler :

I captured Moscow and put a last city after Oxford for aluminium. Signed a couple of RAs. 2 more RAs would have put me near the 230 turn mark. I waited a total of 20 turns for parts and such.

Spoiler :

 

[Arilian]

Why do you sad for a 250 win?

 

[Gamewizard]

Game: Civ5 GOTM 45
Date submitted: 2012-10-09
Reference number: 27400
Your name: Gamewizard
Game status: Science Victory
Game date: 1824AD
Turns played: 282
Base score: 1662
Final score: 2967
Time played: 7:58:00

Saved alot of GS for after research labs, but I was about 1 GS and a couple RAs short of what I needed.

Domination would have been fun in the late game because of all that oil. I conquered Russia after getting cannons and then stopped all military actions to get to the end of the game quicker.

I think I focused too much on building random stuff near the end and should have instead focused more on science.

My third game with William, I find him to be one of the strongest. Didn't use any Sea Beggars this game but I know from other games they are OP and it is a good thing they are nerfing the pirating ability.

 

[kamikazees]

Reference number: 27401
Game status: Science Victory
Game date: 1808AD
Turns played: 274
Base score: 1575
Final score: 2916

I am so very happy to have finished under T300. Just about the whole first 1/2 of the game I was at war, both in fights picked with me and fights I felt I had to pick. I ended up wiping Russia, Celts and France completely. Spain hated me the entire game, but still offered mostly decent trades.

Was able to friend Britain and Sweden after denouncing Rome, which those 2 hated. Only went through about 4 RAs though, because I found them so late and had no friends. Luckily, I got all the wonders I needed. I was able to pop a dozen+ great scientists, from wonders, religious purchases and specialists. I never even opened an industrial policy.

Stone Circles was incredibly powerful here. It allowed me to spread my religion quickly all across the continent. Polders also grew the biggest city I've ever seen (41!). That was incredible. I traded a ton, but never made a sea beggar. In fact, I only built 1 ship, a trireme that I upgraded to a caravel to explore (and later upgraded to a destroyer).

My game did crash at one point, but I had my autosave set at 1 so I reloaded it. Don't think that matters, as I'm not in the running for 1st. Very interesting map (I thought it was pangea at first!). Thanks for the game!

 

[DGDobrev]

welcome to the GOTM.
Please do post in the After Action thread what you do in your replay and tell us what you did differently and how it worked out.

Thanks, and gladly, I will post exactly what I did here.

So, I settled on the coast on the flood plain tile as I wanted to have the hammer from the stone tile right off the bat, and expand to the second stone tile asap. Stole a worker from Venice (they don't really need it anyway, due to their poor position) and then bought one. My build queue up to T100 was:
Scout - Monument - Shrine - GL (took Philosophy, as I was beelining for Guilds at this time) - NC - HG - HS (found religion first, cause Boudicca bit the dust) - Chichen Itza - SH (nobody cared about it obviously, and it was a 7-turn wonder at this point). I opted for buying most of the buildings and units (nothing new). Before I decided to quit, I had also Alhambra, Pisa, PT, Sistine, ND, Taj Mahal, Louvre and Big Ben. Settled 4 GS's too and had a 100+ turn Golden age going, with a view of extending it even longer. My capital was bursting with specialists, and the BPT was ok - 100+ around T100, and 427 when I quit on T220.

For Policies, I went Tradition and opened up Commerce to get a Great Admiral, as it was clear that I would badly deviate from my tactic if I went for Astronomy+Caravel (and no mountain either). Then I took Rationalism, as anyone would do.

For Religion, I took God of the Sea pantheon for extra production and it worked perfectly. HS was completed in less than 13 turns (great for such a start, I gotta admit, as it means fast religion) so I took the following beliefs for Tengriism (I always found this one, as it is the religion of the Great Bulgarians too):
+1 Happiness from cities
+2 Faith from each WW (as I was building them like crazy, it paid off handsomely)
Pagodas
Faster Religion spread 34%/68% (as I expected to go into war with Russia sooner or later and wanted the religion to spread naturally through the captured cities)

Sounds like a great start, doesn't it? Not really. As the civs started going down one after the other, I found myself a tech and faith leader with little to show for... Each wonder was netting more and more faith per turn, but as the game unfolded, I could not shake the feeling that I was going to do it all alone, and that is hardly a recipe for a decent victory. My only 2 RA partners were Isabella and Elisabeth, cause Russia hated me for existing, and Rome for some reason rejected all my DoF offerings. Sweden eked a meager one-city living with a 9 pop capital on T130 (good work) and was soon obliterated - another setback, as the GP bonus was great. Russia DoWed me on T150 and that pretty much forced me to upgrade all crossbowmen to Gatlings just to fend her off (and I was hoping to make her a buddy).

So in the end, I saw myself playing T220, 1 tech away from Flight, and much less beakers per turn than I wanted. Being the leader and cranking out units to go on the offensive was proving to be a small consolation. I couldn't see myself winning the game before T300 at least. So I decided to save myself some time and simply quit. A shame really, as the game was awesome. I cannot recall building so many wonders on Emperor than I did in this play-through.

 

[Attaturk]

Game: Civ5 GOTM 45
Date submitted: 2012-10-10
Reference number: 27408
Your name: Attaturk
Game status: Science Victory
Game date: 1695AD
Turns played: 249
Base score: 1235
Final score: 2520
Time played: 1:46:00

UA was great. I was selling all of my luxuries and buying back different luxuries giving me either 2happy + 240g or 6happy.

Poulder(sp?) was fantastic too. Prioritized Guild after Acoustics.

Did not build UU.

Religion was very useful. 2 great scientists, +2 food from shrine/temple +15% production, reduced cost missionaries, +100g for converted city and +2 religion from quarries.

Spying was used to defend the capital and stage elections.

Overall plan. 4 city tradition GL-NC. RA wherever possible. Beeline Plastic.

Policies: Trad All - Left Side Rationalism - One order - finish rationalism

Build order:

worker - granary - shrine - scout - (buy settler) - monument - settler - settler - GL - Stoneworks?(+1 hammer from quarries) - NC - Itza - (Buy Uni) - Pyramid - ...

1st city on Dyes Tile, sell Dyes - Lib - Workboat
2nd city on Furs, sell furs - buy boat - sell crabs - buy boat sell crabs - Lib - Walls -
3rd city on hill near mountain, 2S from Gems - Lib - HG

Science: Pottery - Mine - Masonry - (Writing from hut. Lucky me) - Calendar - AH - Trap - Sailing - Archery - Wheel - Math - Currency - Horseback - ... - Edu - ... - Astronomy - ... beeline public schools - beeline plastic

Allied Venice early, later got one more maritime and mercantile.

Russia declared on me, took one city. Used it as my coal source.

 

[flairin]

I replayed, going Tradition instead of Liberty and won about 10 turns sooner (t297 instead of t306).

Tradition allowed me to have a much larger capital which probably made all the difference. I missed out on the Hanging Gardens (built it with liberty), and so substituted it with the Great Library for an earlier Guilds (before Education). This helped growth a bit, along with the free aqueducts of course.

I got around to sacking Moscow earlier than before as well and sacked the Celts capital too (unlike my liberty game) so that may have made up some of the difference as well. I built my final two cities after taking these capitals if memory serves me correct. In all I had settled 6 cities in both games... this time around though I took one extra capital.

I was slower to Education and Rationalism but ended up going three deep in Rationalism quicker thanks to the Oracle. My bpt was higher as well since I was able to not only get factories in 7 of my eight cities but also build/buy all science buildings in all but one city.

Selecting the quarries pantheon helped a bit... was able to get 2 GS and 2 GE from religion!! I decided to tech to Factories to enter Industrialization first so as to avoid loosing faith points to a great prophet... if I would've waited for the tech to Public Schools I would have had one less Great Person from Faith. One GE went towards Hubble of course while the other one went to rushing the Louvre.

I simply bulbed techs with GS... did not have the help of rationalism finisher or RA's. If I am able to learn how to play with RA's I could win some 50 turns earlier I think...

 

[Tabarnak]

If I am able to learn how to play with RA's I could win some 50 turns earlier I think...

Not happy about my 250 turns win because it's my worse finish date of all time This land had potential and i made some mistakes, especially not going for education faster or having money to rush buy some unis.

About RA : I don't have any great plan. All i do is to agree every DoF possible and try to sign RAs 30 turns-X= time to get a leveraging item like the 4th rationalism policy or PT. I find that RAs are pretty useful later in the game if you can ally with some huge civs. Unfortunately i only got 2 RAers for my 1st wave and only 1 for my last(dunno why but Spain refused a DoF for some turns while she accepted almost all the time, privating me a nice RA). And 2 civs got whiped too.

The best thing i can do next time is to ensure that every civs will stay alive and pretty equal so i can generate enough beakers to make it worth.

Side note : It says over 6 hours of play but 60% of the time i was afk

 

[flairin]

@Tabarnak

thanks for assuring that RA's aren't as allusive as they seem
I guess I just need to try to focus/practice on this aspect... one time with Babs I got it to work quite well (pre-GandK)

 

[BigChiefLizzy]

Loss to Elizabeth in 1969AD

Made some very poor choices at start, and then they got compounded by Catherine, the mad warmonger from Russia.

Settled two tiles SW near the coast, so I'd have two hill tiles for production, and be able to settle second city on the flood plains, think this was my first mistake. Food/production was poor to start, and I ended up buying work boats to get the crabs.

France declared on Catherine very early, before the classical era and I think she may have been building up a force to attack someone as well, (maybe me), as she wiped the floor with Napoleon, quickly capturing Paris and knocking France out of the game. She also seemed to be teching very fast, so I decided to go straight to iron working to get the Colossus (not all that good on reflection, another mistake I think), and to have swordsmen - then found I only had 2 iron available. Catherine then declares on the celts, and takes their capital as well as another city that borders me.

Then she declares war on me, (and later spain as well!) while still fighting the celts. This was in about 2000BC. The war ended nearly 4000 years later (about 1940AD), after I took Moscow and all her cities bar one. For the first 200 turns She would never settle for peace except for all my cities, resources and gold. Built about 6 sea beggars, they proved useful I controlled the seas while on land I just had to try and hold my own against troops one era ahead of me.

Spies were very useful, must have stolen over 10 techs...

England and Rome also spent the entire game warring (I never met Sweden, who someone mentioned earlier, Rome or England must have wiped them out). Managed to build quite a few wonders (10 in Amsterdam, and 4 in other cities)....

 

[Attaturk]

AE_:

If you see this, can you provide more detail on your replay when you get 239 finish?

I tried 1 city NC, 2 city NC, ... 4 city NC, 2 city NC + 4 cities later. All of my finishes are around 250.

How many RAs did you sign. What were your beelines after plastic?
Did you use fill all specialists slot?

When did you use oxford, PT, leaning tower? Trying to get to 239 and keep missing it by 10 turns.

 

[lolagranola]

I lost as well and I'm going to try a replay to see if I can learn from my mistakes. It was around 1950AD.

I was done everything but the SS Engine when the UN vote came up. I actually hadn't been looking for it for a few reasons. First, Isabella was going culture and had 4 of 5 policies. That said, she was just starting into the last tree and I knew she wasn't going to win. Second, Elizabeth was expanding like mad having wiped out Rome entirely fairly early and she was my only tech-rival. I had completely forgot about diplo VC

I started off strong, building the same 4 cities I've seen in most of the posts. I aligned with Catherine and Boudica early with Napoleon pestering everyone. Eventually I was friendly with everyone and only Catherine DoW'd late as I was working on parts. I suspect this was because, having no uranium, I used a great general to eat into her and the CS territory to get at some and it ticked her off 2 battleships and a nuke settled it quickly, not that I had to.

One mistake I made was not protecting my techs. I was in the tech lead for most of the game but was allowing them to keep pace by stealing constantly from me. I had plenty of RAs as I was friendly, but I was curious if this was wise since I was helping others to keep pace. Still trying to figure out things like that. Are RAs always a good idea or am I enabling rivals?

I'm not sure why I did so poorly relative to others. My score came in around 1000 I believe. I'm at work but maybe I'll post my city shots and get some feedback. I'm still relatively new to Civ 5 and I've obviously got some bad habits.

 

[Smirk]

Game status: Science Victory
Game date: 1770AD
Turns played: 264
Base score: 1569
Final score: 3017
Time played: 12:21:00


Interesting game, Polders rock. Too bad its just all food for so long, specially in a science game. Didn't build a Beggar at all.
The Dutch's true strength is keeping 2 happiness stuff. I traded constantly. Made friends trading all the crabs to my local continent. Grabbed a couple policies in Commerce to get the admiral and look for more trading partners. Ending up maintaining friendly relations to 4 of the remaining 5. I joined France and Spain dog pilling Russia fairly early, maybe around 100-150. Both cause I wanted those 4 dyes for trading and also because joining the war would give me some bright green text with the AI civs left.

Took this amusing screen of Russia's inevitable defeat.

Spoiler :

Also ran into this odd bug. I didn't see what happened, but during a CS turn I had access to Sugar and Jewelry, only to lose it again before my turn came up. Turns out apparently the CS captured a Celt city.
The jewels were not available, and had no improvement options, but did seem to give the default +2 gold. Although I suppose a trading post would give more. I guess I could have settled on that tile and had access to them. Seems to be the same bug with taking a merc CS you keep the unique lux. Although this sounds like its being fixed in the coming update.

Spoiler :

 

[AE_]

AE_:

If you see this, can you provide more detail on your replay when you get 239 finish?

I tried 1 city NC, 2 city NC, ... 4 city NC, 2 city NC + 4 cities later. All of my finishes are around 250.

How many RAs did you sign. What were your beelines after plastic?
Did you use fill all specialists slot?

When did you use oxford, PT, leaning tower? Trying to get to 239 and keep missing it by 10 turns.

I don't remember every detail of the game, but I have two saves from the game which i took screen shoots off:

Spoiler :

Spoiler :

As you can see I started with 3 cities and a short time after NC I built 3 more. I used every possible specialist in Amsterdam since it was growing fast anyway, and i don't like having people swimming in the ocean. In the other cities, number of specialists depended on what kind of tiles they were able to work and how fast they were growing. In the end (sometime after turn 200) I was maxing specialists everywhere.

I used a GE from leaning tower to build Hubble telescope, and used the GS from PT to bulb science in the end of the game. Built both PT and LT as soon as they were available.

The key to the fast victory was using the RA-bug in the end game. I had maybe 3 or 4 RA:s earlier in the game, and when I was approaching the end I tried to set up RA:s with 5-10 turns between them. This will give me the opportunity to time one of them right after I used a lot of GS, which gives a lot of science overflow every turn.

In this game I was friends with England, Spain and the Celts. So I set up 3 RA:s and the second of them had just the right timing. The research was done as follows in the game:

After Plastics I went straight for satellites.
Since the rationalism finisher and one RA was coming up right before I got to satellites, I used one GS and the RA to get Atomic theory and Nuclear Fission and then got satellites and the booster tech from rationalism finisher.
After satellites I used several GS (maybe 5) to finish the entire bottom half of the tree from dynamites to nano. The timing for using GS at this point is perfect for me since my science starts going down when i build SS parts, making GS less effective.
A second RA (the one i ended up aiming for) kicked in right after i finished nano. And all the science overflow i generated by my GS during the last turns meant that I got every tech from the top half of the tree except Mobile tactics and Particle physics from just one RA. Then I used one spare GS and oxford to get those last two techs.

Overall I had a game of optimal luck planning in the end game, which gave me the 239 turn victory.